Completed Event: Men's Basketball versus No. 9-Seed Cincinnati (1st Round) on March 10, 2026 , Loss , 66, to, 73
Final Score
Men's Basketball
66
vs No. 9-Seed Cincinnati (1st Round)
73
The University of Utah Athletics
Kentucky Tops Utes for NCAA Championship
6/21/1999 12:00 AM | Men's Basketball
March 30, 1998
SAN ANTONIO (AP) - They've been called Rupp's Runts, the Fiddlin' Five and the Fabulous Five.
Now they're called the Comeback 'Cats - and NCAA champions, too.
Kentucky capped a truly maddening March with an unprecedented second-half rally, beating Utah 78-69 Monday night to win its second NCAA championship in three years. The Wildcats did it this time with a new coach and without stars in their lineup.
In its third straight rally of the tournament, Kentucky overcame the largest halftime deficit - 10 points - in a championship game to win its seventh national title.
"We're comeback kids," Kentucky coach Tubby Smith said. "These kids have done it all."
With Smith working the sideline instead of Rick Pitino and with former stars Antoine Walker, Ron Mercer and Derek Anderson in the NBA, Kentucky moved one trophy closer to UCLA's record total of 11.
It was the third straight year the Wildcats were in the championship game - they lost to Arizona in overtime last season - and the third straight year they ended Utah's season in the NCAA tournament.
Utah's impressive run to what would have been the school's second title ended because Kentucky did what No. 1 seeds Arizona and North Carolina couldn't do against the Utes - shoot well.
Kentucky fell behind in the first half and trailed 41-31 at halftime after a 10-0 Utah run.The deficit was as many as 12 points in the opening minutes of the second half.
"We're a fighting team - comeback 'Cats," Kentucky forward Heshimu Evans said.
Kentucky's teams have had various over the years. The 1948 championship team was called the Fabulous Five and the 1958 champions were the Fiddlin' Five. Perhaps the most famous of them all were Rupp's Runts, Adolph Rupp's 1966 team that lost to Texas Western (later Texas El-Paso).
The Wildcats (35-4) had been down before in the tournament. In the South Regional final, they battled back from a 17-point second-half deficit against Duke and in the national semifinal they fell behind by 10 before rallying to beat Stanford.
"We've come back all year long," Wildcats' guard Cameron Mills said. "Every time we fell behind, we never quit."
Kentucky's comebacks were just part of what made the NCAA tournament special this year. It was filled with overtime games, buzzer beaters and surprises from the likes of Valparaiso and Rhode Island, Stanford and Utah.
But the Utes, who won the championship in 1944, couldn't pull off one more upset in the title game.
Utah, the second-best defensive team in the country this season, had held its five tournament opponents to 39 percent shooting and an average of 62.5 points.
Kentucky, which finished 29-for-57 from the field (51 percent), chipped away at the lead by scoring on seven of 10 possessions. The Wildcats went on a 9-0 run and took the lead for the first time since early in the first half at 60-58 with 7:16 to play on a breakaway dunk by Jeff Sheppard after he stole the ball from Hanno Mottola.
Utah got the lead back at 62-60 on a driving layup by Andre Miller with 6:16 left and even extended it by two more points when Miller fed Alex Jensen for a layup 23 seconds later.
But a 3-pointer by Mills, Kentucky's fifth of the game - all in the second half - and a driving jumper by Sheppard with 4:53 left gave the Wildcats the lead for good.
Sheppard's jumper was Kentucky's last field goal until the a dunk by Wayne Turner with 12 seconds to play. The Wildcats went 11-for-12 from the foul line down the stretch and Utah's solid offensive game went to pieces as it scored on just two of its last 10 possessions.
Scott Padgett led the Wildcats with 17 points, while Sheppard, the Final Four's most outstanding player, had 16.
Miller led the Utes with 16 points, while Mottola and Michael Doleac each had 15 and Jensen 14.
As the trophy was presented by Selection Committee chairman C.M. Newton, who also happens to be the athletic director at Kentucky and the man who picked Smith to succeed Pitino, the crowd chanted "Tubby, Tubby."
It seemed implausible that any coach could be more popular in Kentucky than Pitino had been in leading the program back from one of its lowest points following probation. But Smith may have topped him in the one year since Pitino left to coach the Boston Celtics.
Kentucky is now 7-3 in NCAA championship games, and its record over Utah in the last three seasons is 3-0 with a regional semifinal win two years ago and a regional final victory last season.
Utah (30-4) had beaten defending national champion Arizona in the West Regional final in a 25-point laugher. The Utes had to hang on to beat North Carolina in the Final Four, but they couldn't do it against Kentucky as the Wildcats wore down the nation's top rebounding team.
Utah finished with a 39-24 advantage on the boards, but in the later possessions Kentucky didn't miss many shots.
In the first half, Utah went on a 10-0 run that Jensen started and ended with layups off long passes to take a 34-23 lead. Kentucky did get within 37-31, but the Utes scored the final four points of the half for the 10-point lead.
The largest halftime deficit overcome in a title game had been eight points. Loyola (Ill.) beat Cincinnati 60-58 in overtime in 1963 after trailing 29-21 at the half.
"I think it's a mental approach," Smith said of the comebacks. "We do a lot of time-and-score situations. We do a lot of practicing in coming back. We teach them how to come back."
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